Alan Webb Plans Move to Longer Track Races

American mile record holder says it's time to focus on 5-K and 10-K.

“I’m just trying to keep things low-key, [and] didn’t feel it was necessary to make a big deal about anything,” explains American mile record holder Alan Webb in a Flotrack interview. Which is why there’s been little fanfare about his training in Portland with Jerry Schumacher’s Oregon Track Club group. That cadre includes sub-13:00 5-K runners Matt Tegenkamp and Chris Solinsky (who is also the first American to go under 27:00 for a track 10-K) and American steeplechase record holder Evan Jager.

“It’s just been great to have these guys to run with, these are the big boys,” observes Webb, who says the longer track distances, the 5000 and 10,000 meters, will be his competitive emphasis as he’s “recognizing that maybe my time has come to shift focus [from the middle distances]. Maybe it should have clicked earlier.”

Webb, who ran a 3:53.43 mile in high school in 2001, is now 30 years old. He’s coming off what was, for him, a dismal 2012 on the track, epitomized by his 11th (and last) place finish in a U.S. Olympic Trials 5000-meter semifinal in 14:01.25. Those doldrums were partly injury-related, and Webb affirms, in 2013 and beyond, that “I just want to move up to some longer stuff and see if I can still play this game.”

Prior to 2007, the year Webb set his U.S. mile record of 3:46.91 and won several major international races, he had run 13:10.86 for the 5000 in 2005, and 27:34.72 for the 10,000 in 2006. Maturity might dictate a move up to those distances, but so, in Webb’s case, does psychology. “The intensity is so high,” he says of the middle distances. “You’re on it every second. There’s no easy part. For some reason, I felt like I couldn’t dig as deep as I used to,” he admits.

Sub-par racing in recent years grated on Webb. “I find that it gets harder and harder to bounce back from it. It just sort of wears on you a little bit,” he says. Though he may have asked himself the question “do I really want to do this,” Webb notes, “I’ve realized that I love the sport. I love doing it.”

Webb was interviewed by Flotrack while in Colorado Springs on an altitude-training stint with Schumacher’s group. He joined the group in Portland, where he’d lived before and still had friends, when his coach, Jason Vigilante, left Virginia to take a job at Princeton University. Webb’s training partner Robby Andrews, a native New Jerseyan, followed suit. Webb resolved to head back west. “I’m trying to get the best out of myself,” he makes clear. “If you’re not getting the results that you want, you can’t just keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.”

The 15-minute Flotrack interview with Webb contains no mention of specific upcoming race plans, but Webb insists, after his dismal 2012, that” I know I can do better,” and that he is “exploring what I can do to improve. I guess I just haven’t found the right answer yet.”